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This paper reconsiders the significance of the Emmanuel movement, a pre- Freudian psychotherapeutic system founded by Dr. Elwood Worcester as a method of church-sponsored healing. Its significance lies in three areas: (1) Historically, it was a popular effort by Protestant clergy to claim religious authority over psychological and psychosomatic ailments, a struggle that the medical profession eventually won almost completely. (2) The Emmanuel movement was an effort to combat the scientific materialism and medical somaticism of its time, including the excessive use of drugs. It aimed at greater individual control over emotional wellbeing through a self-help movement taught by religious leaders using some Christian ideas. Significant parallels can be found with present-day holistic health efforts. (3) Theoretically, Worcester's conception of the "person" is of interest as an effort to construct a nonreductionist view of the interactions of body, mind, and spirit. © 1984 Institutes of Religion and Health.

The relationship between religiosity and environmentalism has previously been examined by studying conservative versus liberal Christian affiliation. This study explores environmentalist attitudes amongst persons whose religiosity does not fit conventional patterns: the so-called “alternative” or “countercultural” spiritual community (e.g, New Age, Neo-Paganism). This network of individuals finds commonalty and solidarity not through organizational ties or a singular theology, but through an overriding ideology that challenges the alleged rigidity and dualistic dogma of mainstream society, and so suggests a new form of social movement. Central to this critique of the mainstream is the notion that the earth is just as sacred as the “heavens,” and so by preserving the earth, one is being “spiritual. “ Excerpts from in-depth interviews with 22 alternative spiritualists feature numerous key environmental/spiritual themes. These excerpts indicate that issues such as religiosity, “liberal” versus “conservative” affiliation, and environmental politics can take on different meanings when explored outside of mainline Christianity.

An important debate among court observers is whether plea bargaining undermines the ideals of justice. This article presents findings that may reconcile some inconsistent research conclusions. It describes how, prior to plea bargaining, one group of court-appointed defense attorneys gauges the strength of evidence through a tacit, taken-for-granted process that emulates trial proceedings: based on their understanding of evidence in the legal community, defenders imagine a courtroom dialogue wherein the prosecution and defense take turns presenting their cases in front of a judge and jury. At issue throughout the dialogue is whether or to what extent information is sufficient, legal, and persuasive enough to convict the defendant. Because the process is part of the defenders' ongoing and unspoken daily routines, it may elude unsuspecting investigators. Ironically, this means not only that some analysts may inappropriately conclude that legal ideals play no role in plea bargaining but also that: others may ingenuously assume that such behavior is more ethical than it actually is.

Through presentation of ethnographic research findings on court-appointed defense attorneys, this article examines plea bargaining as a component of a recursive process for deciding whether a case should be settled immediately or proceed further. The decisionmaking process has three types of activities: assessing the offer for a guilty plea, negotiating the terms of a plea bargain, and counseling the defendant and deciding on a course of action. Until a criminal case is actually settled either through a final plea agreement or a jury trial, this decisionmaking process occurs over and over again. Viewed as a component of this recursive process, plea bargaining encompasses multiple episodes of negotiating behavior as well as a wide range of formal litigation proceedings. Perhaps more important, plea bargaining and trial procedures can actually be seen to converge. I conclude that this mode of plea bargaining is not merely an effective method for representing defendants but perhaps equally or more effective than trial. Some important limitations of the findings are also discussed.

Like other expressions of Christian conservatism, the Promise Keepers (PK) often enact complex and strained relationships between social change and social persistence. These strains are evident in the official PK literature, which employs techniques not unlike those used by mainstream pop psychology. These include the use of “scientific”-like classifications of information, authors presented as “experts” on the topic at hand, and the use of exercises to be enacted individually or in small PK discussion groups. Collectively, these strategies suggest that conservative Christians deal with many of the same complex role demands as non-conservatives. In Particular, the PK stance on gender roles, though Promoted as unambiguously “traditional” in favoring male leadership and female submission, in actuality often reflects acknowledgment and perhaps acceptance of some of the more egalitarian changes in gender role norms. Sociological implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Information on the number of carnivore taxa that were involved with archaeological bone assemblages is pertinent to questions of site formation, hominid and carnivore competition for carcasses and the sequence of hominid and carnivore activity at sites. A majority of early archaeological bone assemblages bear evidence that both hominids and carnivores removed flesh and/or marrow from the bones. Whether flesh specialists (felids) or bone-crunchers (hyaenas), or both, fed upon the carcasses is crucial for deciphering the timing of hominid involvement with the assemblages. Here we present an initial attempt to differentiate the tooth mark signature inflicted on bones by a single carnivore species versus multiple carnivore taxa. Quantitative data on carnivore tooth pits, those resembling a tooth crown or a cusp, are presented for two characteristics: the area of the marks in millimetres, and the shape as determined by the ratio of the major axis to the minor axis of the mark. Tooth pits from bones modified by extant East African carnivores and latex impressions of tooth pits from extinct carnivore species are compared to those in the FLK Zinjanthropus bone assemblage. Data on tooth mark shape indicate greater variability in the Zinj sample than is exhibited by any individual extant or extinct carnivore species in the comparative sample. Data on tooth mark area demonstrate that bone density is related to the size of marks. Taken together, these data support the inference that felids defleshed bones in the Zinj assemblage and that hyaenas had final access to any grease or tissues that remained. © 2001 Academic Press.

The Council for a Parliament of the World Religions has been meeting since 1993 to foster a global religious ethic toward world peace, based on the premise that major world religions share this ethic in common. Roland Robertson's multidimensional model of globalization is utilized to analyze the Parliament's foundational Declaration, and explore why the Parliament's message is not receiving wider attention. Excerpts from anti-Parliament sources are included. Based on this analysis, the Parliament appears to have a limited conception of globalization, and so offers but a partial knowledge claim on how religion can resolve global problems. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that some oppose the Parliament's agenda, feel alienated by it, or-given its limitations-are not aware of it.

Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) performs considerable advocacy online, through its website as well as through press releases and interviews that appear at other sites. Opponents to CFFC also frequently post online. This article analyzes this online debate to explore how it is conceptually framed. CFFC presents a discourse that is promoted as finding ideological consistency between Catholic values and being prochoice, and which addresses a greater social good beyond the Church per se. In making these self-referential claims, CFFC could be viewed as a “community of discourse” (Wuthnow 1989) that reckons with “problems of articulation” by dealing with both specific and broader tensions. Online opponents to CFFC likewise could be viewed as communities of discourse that promote themselves as having the true Catholic values that serve the greater good. On balance, CFFC online would seem to reflect the larger quandaries of abortion discourse, whereby the Internet can offer a representative depiction of democratic free speech articulated on this controversial issue. Yet at the same time, there is little evidence to date that this online debate is changing anyone's mind or building a new consensus, despite some efforts on the part of CFFC to do so.

Purpose: Recent life-course scholarship has argued that desistance from (rather than persistence in) crime is a marker of adulthood. In this article, I argue that a commitment to desistance is only one of many elements of the participants’ sense of adult masculinity, which is best understood by drawing on theoretical literature on “hybrid masculinities.” By linking life-course criminological literature with recent theoretical advancements in the sociology of gender, I connect two important, but as yet independent, strands of research. Methods: Using the grounded theory approach to qualitative research, I performed inductive analyses of 24 in-depth interviews with adult men incarcerated at a state-run facility in the Northeastern USA. Results: I argue that the participants construct hybrid masculinities that combine conventionally masculine traits (such as being a provider and protector) with conventionally feminine traits (such as loyalty, humility, and emotional expressiveness). These hybrid masculinities manifest through the participants’ reliance on intangible markers of adulthood, and they emerge gradually over the men’s life course. I further argue that the disruptions that incarceration poses to the men’s life course impede their ability to realize their hybrid masculinities fully. Conclusion: The current research contributes to the burgeoning literature that attempts to correct the oversimplified portrayal of incarcerated men as singularly hypermasculine, and it also highlights how incarceration disrupts men’s life course, making it difficult for them to be the “hybrid” men that they wish to be. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Drawing on theoretical literature on the mothering discourse, I explore how incarcerated men give meaning to their relationships with their mothers. Using 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated adult men, I argue that adherence to the mothering discourse results in sons holding their mothers’ maternal practices to impossibly high standards while simultaneously feeling obligated to reconcile with their mothers even when doing so is tremendously difficult. I also advance the concept of “maternal fusion”—the process through which the identities of mothers and their children are intertwined—to examine how incarcerated adult sons reproduce gendered mothering ideologies in their narratives of (a) negative early childhood and adolescent relationships with their mothers and (b) reconciliation as they reflect on their relationships with their mothers as adult sons.

Penological literature has focused extensively, and often exclusively, on the “hypermasculine” nature of men’s prisons. A separate and relatively recent body of sociological research has explored “hybrid masculinities,” whereby (usually privileged) men selectively enact traits conventionally associated with subordinate masculinities and even femininities. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to argue that these men construct hybrid masculinities in response to their feelings of insecurity and to resist the hypermasculine prison environment. In so doing, I link theoretical literature on hybrid masculinities with penological research to explore how a particularly marginalized group of men construct hybrid masculinities to cope with and challenge hegemonic masculinity in prison.